 We hit the mud section and chaos ensued. Riders went to every inch of the road, including the grass on both sides, to try to find some sort of rideable surface. But it was a futile effort because ultimately almost all of us would have our frames fill up with mud to the point that our wheels couldn't spin and we would have to start running. Welcome back to the channel. This video is fueled by the feed. I don't think the Unbound 200 needs any introduction at this point. It's in Kansas, it's 200 miles, conditions are often brutal. It's the biggest gravel race in the world. Yada, yada, you've heard it all before. This is the second stop of the Lifetime Grand Prix and after a less than ideal start with a 30th place at the season opener at the Seattle Classic, I was sitting in 23rd place in the series standing. So I was definitely looking to make up some places here at Unbound. This year's course went south, which is usually the easier direction as the gravel is a bit faster. But as we'd soon come to learn, this year's route was anything but easy. Right off the bat at mile 11, they turn the difficulty up to 11 with a four mile mud section. This isn't ordinary mud either. I'd say it's kind of like riding through wet cement. It sticks to your tires, cakes up on your wheels and then lodges into your frame, causing the wheels to stop spinning, making it pretty much unrideable. Hey guys, you ever wonder how you can tell if somebody did this year's Unbound or not? Don't worry, they'll tell you. All about the mud section at mile 11. Once you get done with that, it may seem from looking at the course map that there are two big climbs on the course, but they cover such a long distance that it really doesn't seem that way when you're out there. Instead, it's more so a course of constant rolling hills, and these add up to just over 9,000 feet of climbing over the 200 mile distance. The course also only has two aid stations where your support crews can work on your bikes and give you a feed. Those come at mile 79 and 166, but there are a couple neutral water stops along the way as well. Before we get into the race, a lot of you wanted to see a bike check video of my Unbound bike setup. Fortunately, Adam Roberj and I did one over on his channel. These are the bikes that we used for gravel locos, Unbound, and Belgian Waffle Ride North Carolina, where the two of us took first and second place. Race report on that one coming soon and bike check video linked in the description. All right, the stage is set. Let's get into how the race played out. When the race started, there was a lot of nervous energy in the group, but the pace wasn't that hot with a normalized power of just 245 watts for the first 20 minutes. We all knew that the mud was coming up at mile 11 though, so about four miles before that point, we started fighting for a good position in the group. For just under 14 minutes before we hit the mud section, this jockeying for position required an NP of 329 watts. These efforts are harder than I would like them to be going into a 10 plus hour day, but it meant that I was in good position going into the mud section sitting in the top 10 wheels. As I'd soon come to find out though, this probably didn't make any difference whatsoever. We hit the mud section and chaos ensued. Riders went to every inch of the road, including the grass on both sides to try to find some sort of rideable surface, but it was a futile effort because ultimately almost all of us would have our frames fill up with mud to the point that our wheels couldn't spin and we would have to start running. I personally made it about 50 feet before my wheels completely locked up. Over the next four miles, I would do a combination of running, trying to ride a little bit in the grass, getting off, trying to clear mud from my frame and then running some more. And in the process, I was losing a lot of ground. For whatever reason, I found myself getting through the mud slower than my competitors. It's no secret that I'm a fan of wider gravel tires, especially for a race like Unbound, but that was probably to my detriment in this mud section because I was having some serious clearance issues. I even swapped out my 47 millimeter specialized Pathfinder Pro Tire for a smaller 44 millimeter Reneher Slick to increase the mud clearance, but that still was probably too big. If I were to race in conditions like this again, I would probably go for something as small as a 38, as much as it pains me to say that. I'm to the point now where I don't even consider a 38 a gravel tire, but anything to help get through the mud would have been an advantage here. And this is not me making excuses. I fully owned that I didn't do enough homework leading into the race on what would be the optimal equipment setup for these given conditions, which is a huge part of gravel racing. Hey, don't worry about it, man. Making excuses is also a huge part of gravel racing. When I got out of the mud section, I was somewhere around 69th position and 15 minutes down on the leaders of the race. And the power required to get through this section obviously won't do it justice because there was so much running, but it took me 30 minutes to get through this section with an NP of 249 and an average heart rate of 166 and a max of 178. For context, my max heart rate is around 190. And in typical unbound fashion, my issues didn't stop there. I say that because mechanicals seem to just be a part of this race. Even after I got through the mud section, my bike was so caked with dry mud that it was causing a lot of resistance. It was so bad that riders from the amateur field which started 10 minutes behind us were catching me and dropping me up climbs while I was doing 450 watts. I stopped multiple times to try to clean the mud out of my frame. And it got to the point where I started using my water bottles which were filled with not only water but my flow formulas drink mix that I was using to fuel my race. That's right, I was willing to compromise my hydration and fueling to get the mud out. That's how bad it was. There was a creek crossing around mile 30 and I just dunked my entire bike in the creek. As much as bike mechanics in the audience are probably cringing right now that actually helped a lot. Yeah, my local bike shop hates me. Doing that along with hosing my bike off at a water stop at mile 40 and borrowing some lube from a fellow factor rider from team Amani, Charles Kagimu got my bike in decent working order. Around this time though, I started to develop a slow leak in my front tire. The hole was so small that I couldn't even find it to put a plug in. And I didn't want to put a tube in either because that would almost certainly lead to another flat. So I just stopped every 30 minutes and hit it with a CO2. If I could just make it to the aid station at mile 80 I had a spare wheel in the pits. And once I swapped that out, I'd be good to go. Between all of this drama, I found myself even further back in 76th place at mile 41. For the next 40 miles before I hit the first aid station I found myself surfing groups and then stopping to fill up my leaking tire. This segment between the mud and the first aid station spanned three hours and 42 minutes. And in this time I did a normalized power of 272 watts. When I got to the aid station I got my front wheel swapped. I got my bike hosed off and I got my chain lubed. And I felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off of me. For the first time in four hours my bike was actually working well and that fueled my fire to start the chase. Unbound is all about rebounding from adversity. It's such a long race over such brutal terrain that something is bound to go wrong. Whether that be flat tires or mud or cramping or bonking the list goes on and on and on. Whatever happens to you out there it's important to realize that probably 90% of the participants are in the exact same boat. So sitting there and crying about it is not gonna solve anything. Instead, if you can get back on your bike and put 100% of your effort into the pedals you might be surprised by how well you place by the time you hit the finish line. At least that's what I was hoping. At that first aid station at mile 80 I was in 53rd place which is not what I came here for. I was determined to see how many riders I could pick off over the next 120 miles. After this point I found myself working with Charles again for the next 20 miles or so. And this was perfect because we were trading poles and doing equal amounts of work. Charles is the African time trial champion so he has a lot of power and I thought he would be a great partner to work with all the way up to the finish. We came across one of his teammates though that was having a tough time and Charles made sure that he was okay while I pressed on. Over the next couple of hours from mile 100 to the final aid station at mile 166 I was mostly alone. I was constantly catching riders but few of them were able to help with the chase. Every once in a while I'd come across a rider like Cole Patton or Matt Acker who was able to do a bit of work but it was never for more than 20 minutes before they dropped back and I was by myself again. It was also at this point in the day when it was really starting to heat up. After so many hours of riding alone in the heat it can be quite hard to keep pushing and you have to start playing mental games with yourself. This showed in my power file too the heat really does a number on your power output and according to my Wahoo it hit a max temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit. We can debate the accuracy of that but the point is it was high. Over the three hours and 22 minutes that it took me to ride from mile 100 to 166 my normalized power was only 235. This may seem low but I was actually making up a lot of ground going from 38th place at mile 105 to 25th place at mile 166. That's just how savage the second half of unbound can be and is part of the reason why I adopted the conservative pacing strategy that I used at last year's unbound. The big confounding factor though that was not a factor last year is the heat. Unlike other environmental handicaps like altitude the longer you ride in the heat the worse it gets which is one of the main reasons why the second half of unbound can be so brutal. When people ask me how much water they should carry between the aid stations at unbound my answer is usually as much as you possibly can. If you don't drink it at least you can pour it on yourself. As I came into the last aid station though three things started to work in my favor. One is that a storm was coming in which meant there was a massive tailwind pushing me to the finish. This also decreased the temperature meaning that my power crept back up and finally I had a strong rider to work with for the remainder of the race. I exited the aid station with former US road national champion and world tour road racer for AG2R Larry Warbass. At first he wasn't doing much of the pulling but then he started to catch a second wind and we were trading pulls pretty evenly and catching riders in the process. By mile 180 we were just outside of the top 20 and with each rider that we caught our motivation grew. Over the next hour and 10 minutes my power went up to 266 watts but the last 30 minutes of the race is where things would get really spicy. As we got down to the last 10 miles I no longer wanted the riders I was passing to latch on because then they could potentially beat me in a sprint. My tactic went from encouraging these riders to hop on and help with the chase to attacking them when I passed them so they wouldn't be able to hold my wheel. Tactic, that just sounds like pretty much every ride I do on the bike path. I did this three times over the last 10 miles and the only rider that managed to get on my wheel when I passed them was Tobin Ortonblad. This meant that I had two riders to contend with going into the finish. Tobin and Larry. I didn't want to sprint either one of them because given Tobin's cycle cross and Larry's road pomares, chances are I would not come out on top in that one. When you enter town, right before you hit the finishing straight there's a very short paved climb and it was there that I decided to make a move in a last ditch effort to try to drop these two riders. In this effort I managed to average 545 watts for 40 seconds and this was enough to shake those two riders and I was able to hold them off until the finish line crossing the line in 17th place. This meant that from mile 41 to 205 I made up 59 places. This is what I mean when I say unbound isn't over till it's over. You can have a catastrophic first half of the race and still finish in a good placing. I've learned that from experience at this point. All right, let's look at some numbers from the race starting with that last 10 miles. In the last 30 minutes I had an NP of 304 watts passing four riders along the way and we're at over 10 hours of riding at this point. Taking a step back and looking at the whole race it took 10 hours and 50 minutes with a normalized power of 261, average power of 232, average heart rate of 149, just over 9,000 kilojoules and 589 TSS. Personally, I'm very happy with this result. Getting into the top 20 at a lifetime for your race is not an easy feat for me and I managed to do it at the most competitive race of the season and with this result I moved into 15th place in the series standings. Interestingly enough, this is a slower race time and a lower power output than last year. The reasons for that are probably obvious, the mud and the heat. But last year I only managed a 25th place while this year I broke into the top 20. And this sort of begs the question, despite how horribly I got through the mud this year, perhaps it actually helped my placing in the end. After all, a lot of top contenders either DNF the race or mentally checked out after that mud section and had it not been there I would have still had to contend with them. Either way, the mud at this year's unbound certainly stirred up a lot of controversy. I put up a poll on my community tab asking you guys whether you thought they should have rerouted around the mud or kept it in. And it seemed like most of you thought that they should have rerouted, although some of you were very strongly opposed to that. I myself am honestly conflicted on it. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Ugh, just take it out. And during all these social media posts about how a little bit of mud ruined everyone's race was more tiring than the race itself. If you wanna follow my race in closer be sure to check me out on Instagram. If you enjoyed this video be sure to give it a like, subscribe and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.